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The Heart’s Flight into the Past

If ever there were a milestone in the process we call “growing up,” I believe it’s when we can see our parents through the eyes of an adult— an empathetic adult, hopefully.

If your childhood has been difficult at times, and you are still nurturing the wounds you received from those who brought you into the world, perhaps you will find understanding and healing by wrenching your perception to that of an adult’s.

If you can place yourself, with all of your flaws and “meant-to’s” and “wish I could’s,” at your current age, into the perspective of your parent at that same age, you may be rewarded with a great sense of inner peace.

As I read somewhere, “thoughts of judgment block the light.” If we take the time to imagine our parents as young people faced with problems of every type, if we can say, what would we have done in their shoes?— then a healing light of empathy and understanding may very well flood your soul and heal you.

This is a process that has certainly helped me. My father was a complex man brought up in a time when men were never allowed to show emotion— and he was Scottish, to make it worse! Only when he’d consumed a sufficient quantity of Scotland’s most revered liquid, could he let loose his emotions about the war.

As a child, I was embarrassed. Children do not like to see their parents inebriated, crying, out of control, not being perfect parents. At that time, I was barely aware of World War Two and his contributions, and what he went through. And I seem to recall, he felt he hadn’t done enough, compared to the other good men he knew.

Since I’ve been able to read his story of his service in World War Two as a civilian pilot in the Royal Air Force Ferry Command, and realizing he was in his mid-twenties at the time, my childish heart has softened and forgiven him for those excruciating moments from my early years. He was letting out some of the pain he suffered when those brave guys he knew, flew off over the ocean and disappeared forever. Sometimes without a trace.

How often he remarked, “only the good die young.”

Every time he climbed into an aircraft, did he wonder, will it be my last flight?